A method of creating catalogs of colors for a printer capable of printing in two colors, the catalogs in the form of sets of bit maps which are combined with the primary colors to create palettes of colors which are combined into catalogs of palettes of color for the user to choose from.
Text is usually generated in character coded form on a terminal or equivalent having a keyboard and memory, and is then sent over a communication path of any kind to a printer which converts the code into bit maps of the characters, and prints them on a raster output scanner.
Highlight printers are printers that typically print text in one primary color, usually black, and can print highlight areas, borders, underlines, etc., in another primary color such as blue, green or red. The highlights can be a color that is a continuously variable combination of white, black and the color. Therefore, to use the primary color red, for example, the variations can range from pink to red, when printed without any black component, and from light pink to dark red when black is added. The use of the usual half tone screening process to create two variably sized dots for each square matrix would be obvious, but any dot arrangement can be used. For example, the color pixels could be spread evenly over the matrix area to minimize granularity. The result is a large number of possibilities which complicates the user's job of creating appropriate inks for printing. Also, a number of palettes, each having as many as 100 colors, is typical. A fast and systematic method of generating colors is required.